Hawkish GOP offers no plan for action

Presidential rivals talk tough but vague on details

By David E. Sanger, New York Times

Published 6:45 pm, Saturday, August 15, 2015

If the diverse group of candidates competing for the Republican presidential nomination agree on one thing when describing how they would engage with the world if they made it to the White House, it is this: If only the United States were stronger, and more feared, the country would not feel threatened by the Islamic State, manipulated by Iran or challenged by a rising China.

But after that, finding any consensus on how they would exercise U.S. power differently from President Barack Obama, or a Democratic opponent in 2016, much less how they would define an alternative Republican foreign policy, gets a bit messy.

In speeches, town-hall-style meetings and interviews, many align themselves with the spirit (but not the arms control agreements) of President Ronald Reagan, knowing it is a sure pathway to applause. Except for his son Jeb, they usually avoid talking about the first President George Bush, now considered, despite his victory in the Persian Gulf war, as too internationalist for current Republican tastes.

And many struggle with the question of whether to align themselves with the unilateral actions of President George W. Bush's first term, dominated by the invasion of Iraq, or his second term, when, over the objections of hard-liners, he negotiated with the North Koreans, placed modest sanctions on Iran and set a schedule for America's withdrawal from Iraq.

Listening to the Republican candidates, one can sense how delicately they are trying to step around the buried IEDs of the past decade of U.S. strategy. All begin with the argument that the United States has to do more to take on the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. But most — most recently Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, during his speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Tuesday — are leery of advocating returning U.S. troops to a combat role in Iraq, or using more than air power to dislodge the Islamic State or President Bashar Assad in Syria.

But there are exceptions. John R. Kasich, the Ohio governor, terms himself a "cheap hawk" from his days on the House Armed Services Committee. He declared that in the fight against the Islamic State, "we should be part of a coalition even if it means putting boots on the ground, because as it relates to ISIS you either pay me now or pay me a heck of a lot later." But he has offered no comprehensive plan.

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the candidate with the deepest experience in the foreign policy battles of the past few decades, goes further, advocating sending U.S. troops to directly engage the Islamic State.

And when Donald Trump, one of the candidates with the least such experience, argued the other day for seizing the oil fields that fund the extremists, he drew a sharp, almost sarcastic rebuke from the retiring Army chief of staff, Gen. Ray T. Odierno, who led U.S. troops during the worst days of the Iraq War.

Odierno cautioned Trump — and by extension other candidates — that in their eagerness to advocate force, they risk forgetting the central lesson of the Iraq and Afghan wars, which he called the need to ensure "sustainable outcomes" after U.S. troops leave. A similar debate about short-term versus long-term results, and U.S. strength or weakness, is playing out in the debate over how to respond to the nuclear agreement with Iran signed a month ago in Vienna.

Not surprisingly, all the Republican candidates oppose it. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker likes to start talks about Iran by declaring that he would "tear up" the accord on his first day in office, a line that often draws applause — as it does for at least five other candidates. But scrapping the accord would, of course, free the Iranians to do the same. So some candidates are more cautious. "I'm not one of those guys who's going to say to you, 'On Day 1, I will abrogate the agreement,'" New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said recently.

Almost none of the candidates say what they would replace it with, or how they would prevent Iran, once the deal was abandoned, from resuming a program that has, by the Obama administration's own public estimates, brought it within two or three months of "breakout," the production of one weapon's worth of highly enriched uranium.

"I will reimpose the sanctions waived by President Obama and work with Congress to impose new crushing sanctions," said Marco Rubio, the Florida senator.

But even he has skirted the question of what good reimposing those sanctions would do if America's negotiating partners — China, Russia and three European powers — refuse to go along.